Letter: Sugar and health

From
P WOLFF and V HUNT

Anna Furth and John Harding’s article on the hypothesis that glycation,
the chemical addition of glucose to proteins, is a causative factor in diabetic
tissue damage is flawed through its optimism that a nominally simple series
of chemical reactions can account for complex biological phenomena (‘Why
sugar is bad for you’, 23 September). While it is true that many proteins
become glycated in vivo, and undergo functional and structural alterations
when exposed to glucose ‘in test-tube experiments’, various key questions
still have to be addressed.

First, is it true that high blood sugar causes diabetic tissue damage,
rather than …